


only the names will change

by sarcasm_and_sabres



Series: a spark of time [1]
Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-11
Updated: 2019-02-11
Packaged: 2019-10-26 12:22:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17745842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sarcasm_and_sabres/pseuds/sarcasm_and_sabres
Summary: Sam hadn't figured on finding a job right after college so easily. Sam especially hadn't figured on finding a job in a different country as an international spy right out of college. But, he figures, he could definitely have made a worse choice.





	only the names will change

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Bon Jovi's Wanted Dead or Alive.
> 
> If you found this by searching yourself, please don't read it. This is fictional and intended solely for personal entertainment.
> 
> This is the opening for a spies AU that encompasses the NHL, MLB, NWHL, and CWHL. It's pretty much just a few Sabres in this one, but eventually there'll be a much wider cast of characters. The second and third fics in the series are also Buffalo hockey-centric, and should be up pretty soon.

Sam’s on the quad studying for his psych midterm when a pair of polished shoes stops in front of him. 

“Samson Reinhart?” the owner of the shoes asks, and Sam scrambles to his feet, closing his textbook.

“Sorry, do I know you?” he asks, instinctively reaching out to shake the man’s hand. 

“No, you shouldn’t. I’m Tim Murray. I’d like to offer you a job.”

“I’m sorry, what? How did you find me?” Sam asks. He’s a double major in psychology and physical education, not exactly a combination that makes employers come running. “What type of job?”

“I work for an organization called the Multinational Hazards Bureau, and we recruit people with unique skill sets such as yours. I think you’d be a great fit in our division, in Buffalo.”

“What exactly is it that you all do?” Sam asks hesitantly. 

“I can’t exactly talk about it in a casual setting like this, but I’d love to have a meeting with you and go more into depth about it.”

“Um, okay.” Is this the norm for jobs? It doesn’t really seem like it would be. Sam feels like they should be able to at least give him a brief description of what they do if they’re trying to recruit him, all the way from Buffalo no less.

“Here’s my card,” Murray says, passing him a slip of paper. “Give me a call if you want to know more about us.”

“Thank you,” Sam says automatically. Murray shakes his hand again and walks away, leaving Sam standing alone in the quad with just a business card and a lot of questions. He supposes it can’t hurt to give Murray a call, check out this job. It beats his plan of taking a gap year and trying to figure out what he wants to do with the rest of his life.

 

“Jesus, and I thought hockey training was strenuous,” Sam mutters, pushing himself through another set of burpees. The MHB training is certainly intense, and he can feel himself getting stronger despite that he was in pretty great shape to begin with. It sucks while he's in the midst of a workout but the results seem worth it.

“You played hockey, too?” One of his fellow trainees, a guy named Ristolainen, looks over at him during a momentary pause in his own burpees. 

“Yeah, all through college and until I started here. Did you?”

“Yes, back in Finland. I want to find a rec team to play on once I complete training.” 

“Hey, I was thinking of doing that too! Keep things light outside of work, yeah?”

“Yes!” Ristolainen seems genuinely excited about this, which Sam honestly wasn’t expecting out of the usually quiet Finn. He seems angry most of the time when training or running simulated exercises, and this hockey fan version of him seems almost a different man. “Would you want to go to a Sabres or Beauts game at some point?”

“If this doesn’t kill me, then definitely. I miss watching live hockey,” Sam admits, finishing his set and wiping his brow. In fact, his family thinks he’s a scout for the Sabres. MHB agents can’t have their identities publicly known, and it made his move to Buffalo a lot more plausible. The only issue is that his parents have been hinting that they want to come visit and go to a game for awhile. While he’s still in training, he can get called in at any hour of the day or night, which is supposedly preparation for what it’s like as an actual agent, but makes it awfully hard to plan a family get together. Hopefully once he makes it to a probationary agent he’ll be working more regular hours.

“But instead, we get to get up at three this morning and run a practice version of dealing with a million armed criminals,” Ristolainen mutters. He offers Sam a spare water bottle, which Sam takes gratefully.

“Hey, at some point we’ll get to do the real thing,” Sam says with a shrug. “Not sure if that’s better or worse, but. At least it’ll be something different?”

“You’ve got a point,” Risto agrees. He looks like he’s going to say something else, but their training officer yells at the group to get their asses over to the track, and after that, there’s really not enough breath to talk.

 

“Ristolainen and Reinhart, over here!” their training officer barks after practice about three months into Sam’s training. The rest of the group is traipsing back to the locker room, but there’s more than one curious glance sent their way.

Taylor waits until everyone else has left the room and it’s just the two of them standing in front of him before speaking.

“Murray wants to see both of you. 9:00 sharp tomorrow morning, you know where his office is. I highly recommend you don’t be late if you want to have jobs,” he says. 

Ristolainen and Sam exchange a look, though Sam keeps his expression carefully controlled and Rasmus betrays no emotion. It wouldn’t do to look too excited when being promoted to a somewhat actual spy.

“Thank you, sir,” Sam choruses in unison with Rasmus.

“You’re dismissed. Hopefully I won’t see either of you again.”

Sam nods, and they both turn to go to the locker room. Neither of them speak until they’re in the relative privacy of the locker room, where most of the trainees have already moved on to the showers.

“You think this is it?” Risto asks as he strips off his shirt. “We’ll be agents now?”

“Probationary, but yeah, that’s my bet,” Sam agrees. He knows emotional control is going to be especially crucial as he moves into actual spy work, but he can’t deny his excitement. Not that it hasn’t been interesting learning Spanish and French and undercover etiquette and the basics of how to work an investigation, but with the underlying knowledge that this work wasn’t making a difference, he’s ready to move on.

“Finally,” Risto mutters. He’s only been here about a week longer than Sam has, but yeah, Sam empathizes. “Hopefully we’re not getting brought up because something happened to one of the agents.”

Sam hadn’t considered that, which he realizes now is probably a pretty significant oversight on his part, and he mutters agreement with Risto. He’ll have to get a good night’s sleep tonight, try to be on top of things for tomorrow. It wouldn’t do to make stupid mistakes in front of his—well, hopefully—his new bosses.

 

Sam’s at the main Buffalo office of the MHB at 8:45 the next morning, because he figures showing up just at 9 might not actually look so great. Risto pulls into the parking lot before Sam’s gotten out of his car, so he waits outside to walk in with Risto.

They’d been given the codes for the door in an information packet the night before, so Sam punches it in before swiping his ID card. The door opens and Sam gestures for Risto to go in ahead of him.

Sam had been expecting a quiet office. Well-dressed men and women in suits, sitting at desks and computers, working away. Maybe some messy piles of papers and crowded bulletin boards, but something resembling a normal office.

Instead, he and Risto walk inside to two men screaming at each other, looking about two seconds from coming to blows.

“—and if you weren’t an incompetent shit, maybe it wouldn’t have gone south in the first place and I wouldn’t have had to try to pick up the slack for you!” the guy further from Sam shouts, jabbing his finger into a shorter man’s face. 

“Oh, I’m the incompetent one? Fuck you! At least I’ve closed a single damn case in the last year, eh? Piss the fuck off and get your grubby snitch hands off of my mission so I can actually complete it!”

“Shut the fuck up, both of you!” a woman sitting nearby yells at them. “Some of us actually want to get some work done, and you’re both terrible agents, so neither of you have any ground to stand on!”

“Hey!” A new voice adds to the commotion, along with a slamming door. “All of you, back to work! No more yelling unless you want to get transferred to fucking Edmonton!”

There’s some grumbling, and pointed glares from the two men who had initially been yelling, but everyone goes back to their desks with a minimum of chaos. The man who’d gotten things calmed down turns to Sam and Risto.

“I take it you’re the new guys? Come into my office.”

Sam can feel Risto’s gaze on him, but he doesn’t look over, instead taking in as much as he can of the rest of the people in the office. Nobody looks particularly happy, and there are a lot of tense shoulders. Not exactly the idyllic situation Sam was hoping for in his new job.

“Hi, I’m Dan Bylsma,” the guy says once he’s shut the office door. “Sorry you had to see that first thing, it’s been a bit of a rough week here. We lost one of our best agents recently and morale isn’t exactly the highest. I assume you’re Ristolainen and Reinhart?”

“Yes, sir,” Sam says. “I thought we were going to be meeting with Murray?”

Bylsma rubs at his forehead. “Change of plans. He had to deal with a matter that came up urgently, so you guys get to meet with me instead. Congratulations, you’ve been promoted to probationary agents. Hopefully some fresh blood in here will help things out.”

This time, Sam does exchange a look with Risto. Bylsma seems more defeated than excited to have new agents coming in. 

“Well, thank you, sir,” Sam says. “We’re excited to be here.”

“Alright, I’m going to have Gionta show you guys around. Ask him if you have any questions.”

Bylsma gets up and opens his door, sticking his head out and calling to someone. An older looking agent—thankfully not one of the ones who had been screaming earlier—comes over.

“Hi, I’m Brian Gionta, captain of this division.”

“Sam Reinhart,” Sam says, shaking his hand and privately wondering if Gionta can be a particularly good captain given the chaos going on in his division. 

“Rasmus Ristolainen,” Risto introduces himself, and Gionta nods briskly, leading them out of Bylsma’s office. 

“Nice to meet you two. You’ll be in the rookie room for now, while you’re probationary agents. And you’ll each have a veteran partner to show you the ropes until you graduate to full agent status, which will be me for you, Reinhart, and Ristolainen, you’ll be with Gorges,” Gionta says, leading them down a hallway. “Neither of us have been in Buffalo long but we’ve been in the Bureau for a long time, so we should be able to answer any questions you have. For today, you’ll just be getting set up and doing some preliminary paperwork before you get started on any actual casework. Any questions for me right now? No? Well, this is the rookie room, AKA your new home. Make yourselves comfortable.”

 

Sam learns really quickly that the Buffalo division is—well, to put it bluntly, a disaster. They apparently have one of the worst closure records of any MHB division and have for awhile. They’ve got one of the highest rates of fatalities and casualties in general, which in itself is enough to make Sam kind of regret the choices which have led him here. He wants to make the world a better place but he doesn’t particularly want to die for a case that probably wouldn’t get closed anyways.

It feels like every damn week that there’s a new dead agent and three more unsolved cases. Despite that, Sam enjoys the work he’s been doing. He only goes into the field with Gionta since he’s still a probationary agent, but he likes going undercover. Getting into the mindset of the types of criminals they deal with isn’t easy but it’s rewarding when they get to take them in and he's pretty sure he's getting better at it by leaps and bounds.

 

“Morning, Risto,” Sam mutters to his teammate when he comes in one morning. Sam hadn’t left the night before, digging into financial records in an attempt to figure out who the unknown member of an arms dealing ring is, and he’s really hoping he won’t get called into the field today.

“Here.” Risto sets a mug of coffee down on Sam’s desk, and he lifts it gratefully, downing half of it in one go. “Did you hear the news?”

“Shit, who this time?” They’d lost an agent just last week, and Sam hadn’t thought anyone was out on a particularly dangerous mission yesterday.

“No, nobody’s dead,” Risto says hastily, sitting down at his desk and starting up his computer. “There’s a new kid in the organization, some guy from Boston. Right out of college like you, he’s apparently really promising. They say he’s gonna turn this place around.”

Sam purses his lips, sipping at his coffee. He’d heard that said about him more than once, and Risto too. He’ll believe it when he sees it. Besides, Murray doesn’t seem to have the best track record of bringing new kids in.

“For real this time, or is he just gonna end up being a paper pusher until he retires like the rest?”

Risto shrugs. “I haven’t met him. Apparently some of the vets stopped in on training and were impressed.”

“Huh,” Sam mutters, setting his coffee aside and diving back into his files. He doesn’t think he’s ever heard of vets looking in on the trainees before, so maybe this kid is actually something special. 

Well, Sam will find out in a few months either way, unless he dies in the line of duty before then.

 

Two months after hearing about the wunderkind from Boston, Gionta brings a new guy into the rookie room.

“Folks, this is Probationary Agent Jack Eichel. He’ll be partnered with Moulson and joining Reinhart and Ristolainen in here. Try not to scare him off, yeah?”

“Eichel, nice to meet you,” Sam says, getting to his feet and shaking the new kid’s hand. He’s tall, a little taller than Sam, with piercing blue eyes. “I’m Sam Reinhart, and my deskmate is Rasmus Ristolainen, but he’s off on another mission at the moment.”

“Call me Jack,” Eichel says. He gestures at the third desk arranged against Sam and Rasmus’s. “That mine?”

“Yep,” Gionta says. “Reinhart, can you get him going? I won’t need you until this afternoon.”

“Sounds good.” Sam sits back down, gesturing for Eichel to do the same. “I see you’ve got your initial paperwork there, it should be pretty straightforward. Once that gets in we can get you set up on the system and you can start doing actual investigative work.”

“Okay,” Eichel says, sitting and flipping open the first folder he’d been holding. Sam flicks a pen at him, twitching an eyebrow when Eichel catches it without even looking up.

“Gionta said you’re with Moulson, which means your fieldwork while a probationary agent will all be with him. You’ll be spending the majority of your time in here with us, though. We get to do desk work most of the time, get intel for the guys who spend most of their time in the field. You got any questions at the moment?” Sam asks, taking a sip of his coffee. 

“I don’t think so. Or wait, actually, is that a Beauts mug?” Eichel asks.

“It is. Why, you a fan?”

“Nah, I’m a Pride and Bruins man myself. But always good to meet a fellow hockey fan.”

“You play at all? A lot of the office does, we’ve got a few rec teams going.”

“Really? I played all through college, at BU. I don’t suppose any of your teams needs a center?”

“Mine does, as a matter of fact,” Sam says with a grin. “Our usual top line center is on medical leave, I think you’ve got a good shot at Wally Pipping him if you played at BU.”

“Let me know when and where, and I’ll be there,” Jack says, smiling broadly. Sam can only hope that Buffalo doesn’t wipe that smile off his face too soon.

**Author's Note:**

> Please let me know if you enjoyed!


End file.
